Gruyeres Village, Cheese Dairy & Cailler Chocolate

Gruyere cheese has been made in this valley since at least 1115, and the recipe has barely moved: raw milk, copper vats, and between five and eighteen months in a cellar. It takes four hundred litres to make one wheel. At La Maison du Gruyere the vats are working while you watch, and the difference between the five-month and the eighteen-month cheese is not subtle. Above the dairy, Gruyeres itself sits on a hill inside its walls, one cobbled street wide, with a thirteenth-century castle at the top and no cars anywhere. The counts who built it took their name from the crane on their coat of arms - grue - and ran the valley for four hundred years before bankruptcy ended them in 1554. The village also holds, incongruously, a museum of the work of H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the creature for Alien. He bought a castle here in the 1990s. The bar he built next door is worth seeing even if the museum is not to your taste. The day finishes at Broc, where Francois-Louis Cailler founded the oldest surviving Swiss chocolate brand in 1819 and where it is still made. A food day, not a mountain day. Easy walking, and you will not need dinner.